Challenging Narrative Realities: Antoine Volodine

Abstract

This paper argues that the work of Antoine Volodine and his heteronyms (Manuela Draeger, Lutz Bassmann) interrogates genre and convention in an uncompromising way that moves significantly beyond the generic interrogation conducted by most contemporary writers. It suggests that one productive way to think about his work is to think about it not in terms of traditional genres at all, but through the kind of cross- and multi-genre tonal corpora that recently have cropped up as an alternative to genre, such as Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s notion of the Weird. It goes on to think about the relationship Volodine’s work does or does not have to science fantasy, a defunct subfield of science fiction which on paper seems to have a great deal in common with his work. I discuss the parameters of Volodine’s work in relation to Gene Wolfe, Michael Moorcock, and Cordwainer Smith. I speak in particular about his deformation of place names, his creation of new genres that only he uses (the narrat, etc.), and the significance of the fascination of a defunct light switch in Lutz Bassmann’s Avec les Moines-Soldats, as a way of opening up a different sense of what Volodine’s work accomplishes.

Keywords:

• Genre
• cross-genre
• Antoine Volodine
• Manuela Draeger
• Weird
• Science Fantasy
• Gene Wolfe

Notes

1 For those unfamiliar with Volodine’s work, he publishes under four different names: Antoine Volodine, Manuela Draeger, Lutz Bassmann, and Elli Kronauer. Volodine is his principle heteronym and the heteronym with which he presents himself in public settings, and often in the voice of this heteronym he speculates about what the other heteronyms might have intended in their work. These authors also appear as characters in the work of the other authors.

2 See https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765333629.

3 According to Jeff VanderMeer, “Letters columns regularly ran pleas to the editors not to publish any more ‘garbage’ by Bunch. Even the entry for Bunch in Twentieth Century Science-Fiction Writers notes that his stories ‘met with varying degrees of outrage.’”

4 See Peter Berbergal, “Sci-Fi’s Difficult Genius.” The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/sci-fis-difficult-genius. Accessed 10 Dec. 2019.

5 Nicole Caligaris discusses briefly the similarities and differences between Volodine and Cordwainer Smith in her article “Mille centres de forces.” Volodine, etc. Post-exotisme, poétique, politique, edited by Frédérik Detue and Lionel Ruffel, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2013, pp. 151–159. 

6 This occurs as well in a more comic way in Jean Echenoz’s Au Piano, but Echenoz gives a clear dividing line between his main character being dead and his main character being alive, even if the afterlife seems to be in Paris. In this it is similar to Will Self’s “The North London Book of the Dead,” where the dead simply go to another, less fashionable part of London when they die. Neither fiction, however, suggests that “dying means nothing”: they shift our definition of the life and death relationship, but do not nullify it in the way that Volodine’s work does.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian Evenson

Brian Evenson is the author of over a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection Song for the Unraveling of the World (2019), which is a finalist for the LA Times Book Festival Ray Bradbury Prize and the Balcones Fiction Prize. Earlier books include A Collapse of Horses (2016) and the novella The Warren (2016). Windeye (2012) and Immobility (2012) were both finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel, Last Days, won the 2010 ALA-RUSA Award for Best Horror Novel. His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, Manuela Draeger, and David B. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been translated into Czech, French, Italian, Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, Persian, Russia, Spanish, Slovenian, and Turkish. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.